Free Republic University, Department of History presents World War II Plus 70 Years: Seminar and Discussion Forum First session: September 1, 2009. Last date to add: September 2, 2015. Reading assignment: New York Times articles and the occasional radio broadcast delivered daily to students on the 70th anniversary of original publication date. (Previously posted articles can be found by searching on keyword realtime Or view Homers posting history .) To add this class to or drop it from your schedule notify Admissions and Records (Attn: Homer_J_Simpson) by freepmail. Those on the Realtime +/- 70 Years ping list are automatically enrolled. Course description, prerequisites and tuition information is available at the bottom of Homers profile. Also visit our general discussion thread.

Selections from West Point Atlas for the Second World War Eastern Europe, 1941: Russian Leningrad and Ukraine Offensives  Operations, 2 December 1943-30 April 1944 Allied Advance to Volturno River, Reorganization, and Attack on Gustav Line (17 January-11 May 1944) Anzio-Cassino Area, 1943: Attempts to Cross Rapido and Garigliano Rivers, 17-20 January 1944. Anzio Landing, 22 January 1944. German Counterattack at Anzio, 16-19 February 1944 New Guinea and Alamo Force Operations: Clearing the Huon Peninsula and Securing the Straits, 19 September 1943-26 April 1944 Cartwheel, the Seizure of the Gilberts and Marshalls, and Concurrent Air and Naval Operations, 30 June 1943-26 April 1944 The Far East and the Pacific, 1941: Original Allied Strategic Concept, May 1943; Situation in Pacific, 1 November 1943

2
posted on 01/18/2014 5:43:14 AM PST
by Homer_J_Simpson
("Every nation has the government that it deserves." - Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821))

British attacks draw German reserves
Tuesday, January 18, 1944 www.onwar.com

In Italy... The British 5th and 56th Divisions (elements of the British 10th Corps, US 5th Army) have established bridgeheads over the Garigliano River and continue attacking. General Vietinghoff, command German 10th Army, gets permission from Field Marshal Kesselring, the German Supreme Commander in Italy, to begin moving reserves from the area around Anzio to the battle.

In the United States... Railroads are returned to private ownership and operation.

5
posted on 01/18/2014 5:45:58 AM PST
by Homer_J_Simpson
("Every nation has the government that it deserves." - Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821))

UNITED KINGDOM: The first batch of 600 young recruits to the mines, known as the “Bevin Boys” after the Labour minister, Ernest Bevin, began training today. Their names were picked by ballot on 14 December and they are now under training by experienced miners. Those who have been taken down below said it was not as bad as they expected. They are being paid a weekly wage of £2/10/6. They say that after deductions have been made for hostel lodgings, meals, laundry, insurance and transport to the pit, they are left with only 3/6 a week “pocket money”.

January 12: "Frau Hanna Solf, the widow of Wilhelm Solf (former German ambassador to Tokyo) and her daughter, Lagi Gräfin von Ballestrem--both of them members of the anti-Nazi German Resistance--are arrested four months after attending a Resistance tea party that was infiltrated by a Gestapo informer.

January 13: "Two United States Treasury Department officials--Josiah DuBois and Randolph Paul--threaten to resign and make public the report on their investigation into the State Department's scandalous activities in regard to the Jews. The report is originally entitled "Report to the Secretary [of the Treasury] on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews." The report indicts officials of the State Department for their 'willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler.'

January 18: "Three hundred Jews hiding in forests near Buczacz, Ukraine, are surrounded by Nazi tanks and killed."

"Ona Simaite was named "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem. A librarian in Vilna, Lithuania, she regularly traveled into the city's Jewish ghetto, supposedly in search of unreturned library books. In reality she was taking food and other provisions to the ghetto's inhabitants, as well as helping the underground. Captured by the Nazis in 1944, she refused to surrender any information to her captors despite enduring horrific torture. Eventually the Nazis sent her to a camp in France, where the Allies liberated her"

War Refugee Board

"International efforts to rescue Europe's Jews improved with the January 1944 creation of the U.S. War Refugee Board (WRB). After hedging for more than a year, President Franklin Roosevelt finally responded to public pressure and ordered the establishment of the board. He told the WRB to take "all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death."

"Neither the president nor the State Department, however, was committed to the WRB, and they provided inadequate financial support for its activities. Most funding was solicited from private Jewish organizations.

"Led by John Pehle (pictured), the War Refugee Board coordinated rescue efforts through a small number of operatives stationed overseas. Their rescue strategies included planning evacuations of Jews from Nazi-occupied areas; finding suitable relocation sites; preventing anticipated deportations; and mailing emergency supplies to prisoners in Nazi camps. In August 1944 the WRB succeeded in bringing 982 refugees from Italy, 874 Jewish, to safety in the United States. The WRB focused much of its work during 1944 on rescuing Hungarian Jews threatened by Nazi deportation as well as brutalization at the hands of Hungary's Arrow Cross. Despite valiant efforts, and saving probably more than 200,000 lives, the work of the WRB, in the estimation of its director, was still 'too little, too late.' "

"British troops arrive on the beach of Anzio, Italy, on January 22, 1944. After absorbing fierce German resistance at Anzio, Monte Cassino, and the fortified Gustav Line, Allied forces pressed northward. Rome fell on June 4 and Florence was taken in mid-August. In an intriguing twist, August also marked the beginning of the Italian campaign against Germany, its erstwhile--and now irreversibly imperiled--ally. The Allied drive into Italy and the June 6 Allied cross-Channel assault on Normandy, France, were the beginning of the end of the Third Reich."

IN ITALY, January 18, 1944  It has been more than a year since I last spent any time with our Air Forces overseas. So now for a little while Ill try to tell you what a gigantic thing our "air" has become in this theater.

In the past year I have written so much about the ground forces that they have become an obsession with me. They live and die so miserably and they do it with such determined acceptance that your admiration for them blinds you to the rest of the war.

To any individual the war is seldom any bigger than the space of a few hundred yards on each side of him. All the war in the world is concentrated down into his own personal fight. To me all the war of the world has seemed to be borne by the few thousand front-line soldiers here, destined merely by chance to suffer and die for the rest of us.

All over the world other millions are fighting too, many of them under conditions as wretched as our infantry faces in Italy. But it is easy to forget them in your intentness upon your own hundred yards.

But now, remembering once again, this column will do its stuff with the Air Forces. We may break it up with a short nostalgic jump back to the infantry now and then, but on the whole for the next few weeks well be learning about the flying men.

*

You have to make some psychological adjustments when you switch from the infantry to the Air Forces. The association with death is on a different basis. You approach death rather decently in the Air Forces.

You die well-fed and clean-shaven, if thats any comfort. Youre at the front only a few hours of the day, instead of day and night for months on end. In the evening you come back to something approximating a home and fireside.

In the Air Forces you still have some semblance of an orderly life, even though you may be living in tents. But in the infantry you must become half beast in order to survive.

Here is the subtle difference between the two: when Im with the infantry I never shave, for anyone clean-shaven is an obvious outsider and apt to be abused. But in the Air Forces if you go for three days without shaving you get to feeling self-conscious, like a bum among nice people, so you shave in order to conform.

*

Im now with a dive-bomber squadron of the 12th Air Force Command. There are about fifty officers and two hundred fifty enlisted men in a squadron.

They all live, officers and men too, in a big apartment house that the Italian government built to house war workers and their families. It looks like one of our own government housing projects.

It is out in the country at the edge of a small town. The Germans demolished the big nearby factories beyond, but left the homes intact. When our squadron moved into this building it was their first time under a roof in six months of combat.

Now our airmen have wood stoves in their rooms, they sleep in sleeping bags on folding cots, they have shelves to put their things on, they have electric light, they eat at tables, sitting on stools, and have an Italian boy to clear the dishes away.

They have an Italian barber, and their clothes are clean and pressed. They have a small recreation room with soldier-drawn murals on the walls. They can go to a nearby town of an evening and see American movies, in theaters taken over by the Army. They can have dates with nurses. They can play cards. They can read by good light in a warm room.

Dont get the wrong impression. Their life is not luxurious. At home we wouldnt consider it adequate. It has the security of walls and doors, but it is a dogs life at that.

The toilets dont work, so you have to flush them with a tin hat full of water dipped out of an always filled bathtub. The lights go out frequently and you have to use candles.

Its tough getting up two hours before daylight for a dawn mission. The floors are cold, hard tile. There are no rugs. Some of the windows are still blown out.

*

And yet, as the airmen unblushingly admit, their life is paradise compared with the infantry. They are fully appreciative of what the infantry goes through. There has recently been a program of sending pilots up to the front as liaison officers for a few days at a time. They come back and tell the others, so that the whole Air Corps may know the ground problem and how their brothers are living up there in the mud.

It has resulted in an eagerness to help out those ground kids that is actually touching. On days when the squadron dive-bombs the Germans just ahead of our own lines it isnt as academic to them as it used to be. Now the pilots are thinking of how much that special bomb may help the American boys down below them.

It is teamwork with a soul in it, and were fighting better than ever before.

Ernie Pyle

Source: Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols, pp. 200-02.

Another gem from Pyle. Since I have been following the activities of both the 8th Air Force and the army infantry in the southwest Pacific extra closely as I follow the exploits of my father and uncle on those two fronts I am often struck by how different their experiences were, though they were both in harm’s way.

11
posted on 01/20/2014 12:11:34 PM PST
by Homer_J_Simpson
("Every nation has the government that it deserves." - Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821))

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